The Politics of the Benghazi Report

Representatives Lynn Westmoreland, of Georgia, and Trey Gowdy, of South Carolina, after announcing the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s report on the 2012 attack in Libya that killed four Americans.

Photograph By Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call / Getty

The release, on Tuesday, of the proposed report by the House Select Committee investigating the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, was, if nothing else, a reminder that people in Washington pay a lot of attention to who their political enemies are. It is too much to say that they make good or practical use of this knowledge. This investigation, led by Republicans, wasn’t the first thorough, and politically charged, congressional investigation into the attacks—this one makes it eight, and, at a cost of seven million dollars, it is the most expensive yet. The goal of finding out what happened in Benghazi has long been subsumed by the task of producing an indictment of Hillary Clinton, whose Presidential aspirations are its real target. That task is not any better realized in the eight hundred pages of the proposed report (which still has to be approved by the full committee) than it was before, which may be a source of frustration to Republicans. It is a small sign of the political pique involved that, earlier this month, the committee issued a statement with the title “#DishonestDems can’t keep their misleading claims straight,” in which it took issue with the Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings’s comment that the committee had been at it for three years—even though the Democratic committee members’ own Web site said that it had been at it for seven hundred and sixty-four days. “As anyone with a calculator can easily determine, that’s only two years and 34 days,” the committee noted. Case closed. The report it took that time to produce is similarly marked by a petty triumphalism that, for all the Republicans’ talk of the heroism of the four Americans who died in Benghazi, does not honor their memory. (The sister of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who was one of those casualties, made this point in an interview with Robin Wright.)

Someone on the Republican staff also made an effort to count the number of times that Donald Trump’s name was listed in a competing, minority-proposed report that the Democrats, who have said that they were shut out of the process, released on Monday. (There will also be a bonus report by two Republicans who feel that Clinton wasn’t attacked enough in this one.) There were twenty-three “Trump”s, a number that the Republican statement annotated with the wordless note “?????” The point seems to have been that the Republicans were absolutely floored by the charge that Presidential politics might have played a role in their investigation, even though, at the press conference in which they presented the report, they found time to rail against Sidney Blumenthal, a friend of the Clintons. As it happens, one of the mentions of Trump in the Democrats’ report involved his critical tweets about how Trey Gowdy, the Republican chair of the committee, had handled the questioning of Hillary Clinton last October, which had lasted a full day and yielded exactly nothing new. “Face it, Trey Gowdy failed miserably on Benghazi,” one read. In another, Trump described the congressman as “Benghazi loser Gowdy.” Trump coined that nickname in December, after Gowdy endorsed Marco Rubio in the Republican primaries. On Tuesday, after the proposed report came out, Trump tweeted, “Benghazi is just another Hillary Clinton failure. It just never seems to work the way it’s supposed to with Clinton.”

One of the stranger examples of the partisan distortion field around Benghazi is that what is presented as one of the key, damning insights of the report, highlighted in a video narrated by Representative Peter Roskam, of Illinois, depends on a note stating that, as Roskam put it, as soon as President Barack Obama was briefed on the situation on the ground, “he gave very clear directions: do everything possible to save Americans.” (And, as Leon Panetta, who was then the Secretary of Defense, is quoted saying in the report, “to use all of the resources at our disposal” to do so.) The problem was that there were no forces easily positioned to do so, and it is reasonable to ask whether there was wishful thinking involved in determining how secure the situation in Libya was. At the same time, this assessment conflicts with earlier insinuations that, if only Obama and Clinton had made a single call, the four Americans could have been saved. And yet it is presented not as praise for the President but as a signpost pointing to vaguer culprits, such as “the White House,” “the Pentagon,” “State.” “Washington was acting like it was someone else’s family under attack,” Roskam said on CNN. “That’s the scandal we need to focus on.”

If there is a “scandal” here, the Republicans haven’t found it—though anyone looking for failures can find plenty. To the extent that Benghazi is shorthand for everything that has gone wrong in Libya since the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi, which the United States supported and contributed to, what is necessary is not an investigation but a hard debate. Clinton was instrumental in the Administration’s decision to play a military role in the country’s revolution, and the aftermath has not gone well. The G.O.P.’s conspiratorial compulsion—the promise to its base that more hearings on Benghazi will expose lies, plots, and Huma Abedin-directed schemes—has blunted any real discussion about what Benghazi might teach us about American interventions. Whether or not that is a tactical error for the Republicans, it is a loss for rational discourse. (Clinton, in a brief response to the report, said that it was clearly time to “move on.”)

If the report is an illustration of the hyper-awareness of political enemies in Washington, it is, unfortunately, also a reminder of how uncertain the United States can be about the identities of the players in places like Benghazi. One revelation that the report claims is that a witness the committee interviewed had a different read on which Libyan militia, exactly, came to the rescue of the Americans who remained in the burning compound hours after the attack began. (According to the report, it was one made up of former Qaddafi supporters.) There is also a vignette, in the report, about Marines in Rota, Spain, who were told to change “in and out of their uniforms four times,” according to the report—“from cammies into civilian attire, civilian attire into cammies, cammies into civilian attire,” as the platoon commander summed it up in testimony—before deploying to Libya after the attack, as commanders and the Embassy in Tripoli went back and forth about how they should be dressed. The question was whether civilian or military wear would go over better with locals on the ground. (The Democrats pointed out that the clothes-changing was not a revelation but something that had been previously reported, although the Republicans may have had more details on the number of switches.) In fact, the Marines could have changed their uniforms twenty-four times and it would not have made a difference in saving the lives of the Americans, because there weren’t aircraft at Rota to transport them and, anyway, they were being sent to Tripoli, not Benghazi. Still, the anecdote is a dispiriting commentary on the confusion about what to do in Libya once the first, satisfying operations were over.

One section of the report opens with an e-mail that Hillary Clinton sent to “Diane Reynolds”—the e-mail pseudonym that Chelsea Clinton used—immediately after the attack, mentioning that an Al Qaeda-like group appeared to be responsible. This is the preface to an intricate analysis of the Administration’s initial response to the attack. It is also part of the other legacy of the various Benghazi investigations: their demands for documents brought Clinton’s private e-mail server to light. But that is a whole different story.

Amy Davidson Sorkin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2014.

There was a moment when Hillary Clinton looked a bit uncomfortable, but, unsurprisingly, the congressional hearing turned up nothing new—nada.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.